The World's Biggest Plant to Suck Carbon Dioxide From the Sky Is Up and Running:
The world's biggest direct air capture (DAC) plant is set to come online in Iceland on Wednesday. The moment is an important one in developing new technologies to help suck carbon dioxide out of the air—but raises a whole host of questions on the future of how we're going to put those technologies to use.
The Orca plant, located about 20 miles (30 kilometers) southeast of the capital of Reykjavík, uses large industrial vacuums to remove carbon dioxide from the air. The plant's owners and operators, a Swiss startup called Climeworks, said that the plant can remove 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere, powered by hydrothermal energy. Climeworks has partnered with a carbon storage company to take that carbon dioxide and store it deep underground, where it turns into stone (whoa) after about two years.
Unlike other carbon capture technologies that prevent carbon dioxide from being released from dirty technologies in the first place—which are generally attached to fossil fuel facilities—DAC plants like Orca present the possibility of removing some of the damage we've already done. In theory, we could dot the earth with plants like Orca, resulting in what are known as "negative emissions." These types of technology aren't ready for primetime at scale yet, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said we need them to help meet the target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) outlined in the Paris Agreement (in addition to cutting emissions in the first place of course).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @09:10PM (3 children)
...and all you other green and leafys, but we have a planet to save!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday September 09 2021, @09:45PM
Bu, bu, but . . . this biggest plant that removes CO2 from the atmosphere is a plant. And we should breed more of them! And plant them everywhere. Including in forests.
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(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday September 10 2021, @02:10AM
I always wonder what they have against breathing.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @02:36AM
According to this, a forest of 2,400,000 trees would remove the same amount of carbon per year. Actually an overestimate since TFA used metric tons, and this calculation used imperial tons (and the latter are larger).
https://co2living.com/reduce-your-carbon-footprint-by-planting-a-tree/ [co2living.com]
Several articles put an upper bound of around 2500 trees per hectare...
https://nhsforest.org/how-many-trees-can-be-planted-hectare [nhsforest.org]
https://coed.cymru/images/user/Tree_Planting__Coed_Cymru_2017.pdf [coed.cymru]
So, just 960 hectares of trees. Yellowstone National Park in the U.S. is 900,000 hectares.
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/28/ [unesco.org]
So, if planted maximally with trees, this single park would be the equivalent of nearly 1000 of these carbon factories.
Draw your own conclusions, but seems to me that trees currently scale better. Probably a lot nicer to look at too.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 09 2021, @09:18PM (13 children)
We need to recapture all that money spent on scam "carbon credit" schemes, to build more of these plants. And, yes, I'm looking at Al Gore, first and foremost.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday September 09 2021, @09:38PM
I hope they can design a plant that takes out more than 4,000 tons/yr, considering we've been putting in something like 30,000,000,000 tons/yr.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @09:43PM (11 children)
Oh the irony.....
"But there’s an important part of context behind those impressive-sounding numbers: 13,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide is less than 1% of the yearly emissions from a single coal plant. (The 4,000 metric tons the Orca plant will capture is less than the yearly emissions from just 800 cars.)"
And also factor in that the locations these sorts of plants can be efficiently built is extremely limited.
Carbon capture for the most part has been a complete green-washing exercise, diverting money to polluting industrial companies rather than actual green-focused companies.
You can see this from the article itself. This plant represents an increase of CC worldwide of 40%. So the total CC of the world is currently sweet fuck all.
In Aussie they apparently used CC promises to funnel taxpayer money to the oil/mining companies as a pseudo subsidy while capturing nothing.
Face it. Human society are so naturally corrupt that initiatives like this just wont work.
Tax it to use greed to solve the problem or just give up already!
(Score: 4, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 09 2021, @09:57PM (10 children)
I have to agree, I suppose. The first and second and third and even the fourth plants will amount to less than fuck-all, so we should just give up. There's no point in building more, bigger, and more efficient plants. We should just give up, roll over, and die. Got it. Let me wander off and choose my final resting place now . . .
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @11:06PM (7 children)
The energy efficiency of these plants isn't enough to justify diverting green power away from the grid. Every dollar spent and every joule of energy consumed by these projects would be more effectively directed towards green power generation. We would need to eliminate fossil fuels before carbon capture becomes anything other than a net loss.
If you want actually effective carbon capture the best long term solution is to plant coral.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 09 2021, @11:37PM (5 children)
What you say may well be true. But, that wouldn't preclude further research, would it? Now would it preclude building such a plant that relies only on solar and wind power. What if it weren't attached to the electrical grid at all, but it ran when wind and solar energy were available? I see no harm coming from these plants. We've pumped billions of tons of carbon out of the earth, these can pump some thousands of tons back into the earth. It looks like something of a win to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @12:19AM (3 children)
And yet again you are wrong.
Projects like these green wash and are used as fake positive PR to get people to do nothing. Just like in Aussie.
The amount carbon produced making the tons of steel, concrete, etc just to build the plant will mean it is in deficit for some time. I mean the amounts it is capturing are ridiculous.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @01:43AM
"Projects like these green wash and are used as fake positive PR to get people to do nothing."
True, but they also are necessary as prototypes for the tech in case we actually do need to build a million of these things.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday September 10 2021, @02:06AM (1 child)
These projects don't do nothing; they suck grants out of governments, and venture capital out of wealthy entities that need a massive tax write-off.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @12:09PM
So would worthwhile projects be those that result in efficiencies and cost savings, like making things cheaper and easier to make, that go back to wealthy entities? What is a project that "does something" by whatever metric you use?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 11 2021, @07:59PM
Carbon capture projects divert money away from green energy production that would otherwise reduce carbon production. Even if it has its own wind and/or solar generation, that is power that isn't going to the grid where it would be more effective.
We are still pumping carbon into the atmosphere. Pumping one ton back instead of not producing ten is a net loss.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @12:12AM
I not 100% sure but I think this plant uses geo-thermal energy to power itself?
Could be wrong, but such plants ONLY make sense at all (and perhaps not even then) if they do similar.
Although one has to wonder if you factor in the TCO (total carbon of ownership) whether this plant will ever make sense even if run optimally.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by corey on Friday September 10 2021, @12:05AM
His point was not to give up, but to stop digging coal up and burning it, among other emitting exercises.
Each dollar spent in carbon capture gets you say 1 unit of reduction in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
But each dollar spent in reducing carbon emissions in the first place gets you much more that 1 unit, probably 10, or even 100+.
He’s exactly right, you notice the ones doing and promoting the carbon capture are almost always the same ones doing the emissions in the first place. It’s all money.
We need to keep focussed on not emitting in the first place. Then we can start with carbon capture. Planting more trees is probably cheaper and more effective than big machines
I was also going to say, ok to build this machine in Iceland as a demo unit. But the CO2 density is low there. Build it in the middle of a big city or highway where the density is much higher. It’s going to be much more effective there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @12:09AM
Idiot. Read my comment properly.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @09:21PM (7 children)
Kudos to Icelanders for monetizing the surplus of stupidity outside their island.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday September 09 2021, @09:46PM
They need to build lots of these plants here in the US!
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday September 09 2021, @09:48PM (5 children)
What if people could grow these plants in their back yard?
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(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @11:04PM
Oh no, that would get in the way of the grass! We can't let the neighbors think we don't have a giant herd of sheep by planting anything other than grass, can we? That would just be indecent!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @11:08PM (3 children)
Plants are effectively carbon neutral. If you want to actually reduce environmental carbon it needs to be sequestered in a form that is stable over the long term. Limestone deposits from shellfish and coral are the longest term carbon storage there is.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @01:33AM
Drop plastics trash down an old coal mine shaft. Drop useless pieces of wood there too.
Let the next sapient species after us dig up the coal produced from that, and wonder why and how there are nails and screws and stuff in the seam.
https://www.ancient-code.com/drill-bit-embedded-in-coal-indicates-advanced-civilizations-existed-on-earth-before-humans/ [ancient-code.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 11 2021, @02:33PM (1 child)
Not really, they're only carbon neutral when fully grown and that's when you cut down trees and use the timber as a construction material, while a new tree grows in its place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 11 2021, @08:06PM
And what happens to that construction material at end-of-life? It either gets burned or sent to landfill where it decays, releasing carbon back to the atmosphere.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Freeman on Thursday September 09 2021, @09:36PM (3 children)
It seems like it would be better to focus on not putting excess carbon dioxide in the air. As opposed to slapping one of these facilities up. Require factories that produce the pollution to also capture said pollution, instead of just polluting.
So, we can convert that to 4,400 tons per year, per facility.
https://www.gotreequotes.com/how-much-co2-do-trees-absorb/ [gotreequotes.com]
So, that's about 440 hectares of trees worth of CO2 removal. Which converts to 1.69 square miles or 4.4 square kilometers of trees. That's not terribly impressive. Though, maybe useful for dense population centers and/or to be placed around an industrial zone?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Thursday September 09 2021, @11:18PM
Or, compared to CO2 emission from cars at 122.3 grams/km (in Europe) [europa.eu], that would be 32,706,460 car kilometres or 20,339,838 miles. A yearly average of 13,476 miles per car (in America) [idrivesafely.com], such a plant would compensate for 1509 cars.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Friday September 10 2021, @05:03AM (1 child)
Why is this an either-or choice? Do both.
The problem is that not all parts of the world are willing to cooperate on limiting their emissions, and the parts that are can only do so much with limiting their own emissions. Building plants to actually suck CO2 out of the air (assuming they come out carbon-positive (negative? whichever terminology is the good one)) helps out on top of that.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 11 2021, @08:11PM
The problem with that is that we still have a long way to go ourselves and projects like this take grant money away from other more beneficial projects. And that is assuming that this plant can sequester enough carbon over its lifetime to make up for its own construction.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Hauke on Thursday September 09 2021, @09:40PM (3 children)
I'm sure there are new technologies that will benefit from this endeavour.
However, does anyone have any idea what this plant cost to build?
-There's a lot of steel and other metals there, what's the carbon cost of producing the materials that went into this plant?
-What's the carbon cost of transporting said materials and the construction crew to the site?
-What about the construction equipment and fuel used to build the plant?
-What about ongoing costs? (Maintenance, repairs, geothermal still heats the atmosphere)
In short, how long (assuming 4,000 tons of CO2 per year), does it take for this plant to pay for itself?
TANSTAAFL
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @09:55PM (2 children)
You are not supposed to think of these sort of things. Everyone knows they used unicorn magic to make this, just like they use to make and recycle cell phones.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @01:50AM (1 child)
Bzzzt wrong! Same fallacy as "electric cars won't work cause making batteries pollutes."
It is always the same excuse to not stop pumping pollution into the atmo. Yes there are lies and bullshit, but punish those and don't lose site of saving our planet from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday September 10 2021, @05:00AM
"Won't work"? The cars themselves clearly work; it's just a question of whether they actually save CO2 as is their purpose for being.
Quite quick to whip out the fallacy button here buddy
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @09:56PM (5 children)
Wouldn't it be far more efficient to run the things that currently emit CO2 on zero-emissions energy instead?
That's where the investments should go if you care about this issue.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday September 09 2021, @10:16PM (1 child)
Yeah but no.
Renewable energy (with geothermal as in TFA being a notable exception) has an intermittency problem. Sun doesn't always shine (on your panels), wind doesn't always blow, etc.
They try to reduce the chance of blackouts by having lots of types of renewable, but that also means when everything is working there is too _much_ power - here they (we) often pay
wind power producers to turn the turbines _off_ on days of plenty.
A lot of the big power consuming processes require reliable non-intermittent power. Shut down a blast furnace and it takes weeks (and lots of power and $$$) to restart.
So you absolutely need reliable base load providers - mostly nuclear or fossil fuel (burning biomass also, but that has now got a dodgy less-than-green rep, geothermal only works in limited locations.
A better idea would be to continue to have fossil, nuclear etc. for reliable & base load, top up with lots of renewables _and_ use the surplus energy when the renewables are all online to power carbon capture to offset the fossils use. That is _if_ the carbon capture process is one of those that can be turned on/off at will and not something which needs continuous reliable power itself... (I don't know if that's the case or not)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @11:20PM
Deep shaft geothermal can be built just about anywhere.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday September 10 2021, @12:19AM (2 children)
If we had time that would be the preferred course of action.
But as of 2019Fossile fuels accounted for about ~68% of the worlds electrical capacity. Replacing that with zero emission energy sources like solar and wind is going to take decades at least and require some serious industrial capacity that just isn't in place yet.
With the exceptions of Hydroelectric (16%) and nuclear(12%) all other Carbon neutral sources of electricity combined make up a whooping 3% of the annual electricity needs of the world.
Think about that for a moment, 3%, just three fucking percent of the electricity used annually by the world comes from solar, wind, and all the other "green" sources.
Betting on those to save our asses within the next decade is pure fantasy. Give them another 3-4 decades and maybe, just maybe they can come close. But currently those technologies come at environmental costs that no one is really talking about right now or have localization issues that don't let them scale very well.
Very true except people aren't doing that, they are ignoring, or vehemently objecting to, zero emission energy sources that have the capacity to be solutions today.
The best Carbon neutral energy sources currently are Hydroelectric and nuclear. Hydro isn't going to get expanded much in the future due to the environmental damage they cause and just the simple fact that its not suited for all locations.
Nuclear energy also has had issues that have made it a second "N word" that no one wants to talk about. But it is probably our best short term bet with the alternative reactor designs that are finally getting the attention they deserve. It is the only Carbon neutral source that can scale to local needs and be used in just about every location on the planet. If a Thorium fuel chain is used with the right core design it can be a lot safer, cleaner, and more efficient than any other currently viable zero emission energy source available. It also has the huge advantage of allowing coal and gas fueled power plants to be retrofitted to nuclear which can help to phase out fossil fuels faster as the cost of a converted plant is going to be a lot cheaper than a new plant from scratch.
We don't have time anymore to sit around argue about what is the best Carbon neutral energy source. The Hoard is at the gate. We need to use the ones we have now to bridge the cap between present and future "perfect" energy sources.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @02:41AM (1 child)
Good points, except I will reiterate that this proposed atmospheric carbon sequestration device is 100% dependent on zero-emissions power to do any good.
Not only that, but one unit sequesters little carbon, so you will have to build a freaking lot of them to have any impact at all. You will have to MASSIVELY SCALE UP ZERO-EMISSIONS POWER GENERATION for this to work. Do you not see the problem here? If massively scaling zero emissions power generation is possible, YOU DON'T NEED THESE CARBON SEQUESTERS. You use that zero-emissions power directly for your power generation needs.
This thing is a greenwashing SCAM.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday September 10 2021, @11:07PM
Your right, to power these CO2 capture plants we need the use zero emission or Carbon neutral energy sources for it to mean anything and powering them from the grid is going to require getting rid of the current CO2 spewing sources anyway.
Except for one little thing your over looking.
The Carbon already in the air. Did you forget that part? You know, the stuff currently causing the average global temperature to increase. Just planting trees and singing Kubai-ya isn't going to help as fast as we need it to. We need to get the CO2 out of the air asap and get the levels back to what they were in the mid 20th Century at minimum, or preferably back to early/mid 1800's levels before Humanity started fucking the air up in the first place.
Another factor your over looking is that these plants can be built anywhere there is a local carbon free source of energy, like that geothermal field in the middle of Siberia, that modest sized desert island in the middle of the Paciffic that gets sunlight 90% of the year, or some other middle of nowhere location that isn't worth using otherwise because of the power lines to connect it to the grid would cost too much. Just use the C-neutral energy at site to extract CO2 from the air.
Are CO2 capture plants like this a preferred solution? No. But for right now we need to be evaluating and using ALL options to reduce/remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Fast. So plants like this CO2 capture may seem like a scam currently the technology is going to be needed in near and foreseeable future. This is a pilot plant, the tech will improve and the efficiencies will likely increase to where they actually are doing more than just making a symbolic gesture. We are on the verge of being at the point where even clutching at straw will help.
If Humanity had actually started to do something about he CO2 levels 60 years ago when the rising levels were first noticed we wouldn't be at the point today where we have to build machines to remove the CO2 from the air. We didn't. And here we are.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @11:38PM (1 child)
Is it as big as a Redwood Tree?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @05:41PM
You realize redwoods start out very very tiny right? Takes a very long time for them to get bigger, but don't let that dampen your reforesting mojo!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday September 10 2021, @12:35AM
Tree's are crappy carbon sinks. They take decades to sink as much Carbon as other crops. In the amount of time it takes an acre of trees to produce any significant biomass the right annual crop can produce 4 times as much.
Pick the right crop for the local environment.
For example Bamboo, it grows insanely fast and can be converted into pure carbon, ie charcoal cheaply and efficiently. Then that charcoal can be sequestered in numerous ways. Add water and grind into a slurry to pump into abandoned coal mines, mix with a environmentally safe binder and compress into big bricks that could be dropped into oceanic continental plate subduction zones to eventually get buried deep in the Earths crust. Etc.. Or maybe use them to fuel a coal power plant to make at least some of it's Carbon output neutral.
We are going to need to get very imaginative in the coming years to find solutions that work NOW and not in some fantasy land 20 years away.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @12:45AM
I thought this was going to be about redwoods. Disapoint.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @08:31AM
Great. Now instead of waiting for the sun to supply the energy into the atmosphere, we supply it directly from inefficient machines. That's definitely some progress, but do we move in a right direction?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @01:18PM
You smell that?
Do you smell that?... GREED, son.
Nothing else in the world smells like that.
I love the smell of GREED in the morning.
Great tax evasion and greenwashing machine you got there Bill.
Also, fans?
Seriously, fans?
Any geek here can attest to the ongoing maintenance nightmare of anything with a moving part.
Motherboard and GPU fans for example...first things to fail on anything electronic.
Good luck with your 4000 to 40,000,000,00 ratio, will scale your bank accounts flushly Bill.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @02:33PM
Everytime I see a carbon capture project it makes me wince. The useful part of CO2 is the O2, with plants/trees the Carbon is removed from CO2 and O2 is emitted.
A carbon capture device captures the CO2 and emits nothing, essentially this removes useful oxygen from the air. So why would anyone be lauding a technology which takes a gas from the air that we need to exist?